Word: recklessness
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Musically the album is creative and rewarding. Like Hejira, her last album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter continues to move away from the tight jazz-rock style of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Several of the extraordinary musicians who played on Hejira contribute to the new album, particularly bass player Jaco Pastorius of Weather Report and drummer John Guerin of the L.A. Express...
...earlier albums, Mitchell occasionally explored extended instrumental sections. "Paprika Plains," a 16-minute song that occupies the entire second side of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, is her longest and most exhausting instrumental effort to date. This song is a reverie, set in a late-night doper's fog, recalling the pain and sweetness of childhood and varied impressionistic scenes of her youth. Mitchell comes close to the warm chords she used in earlier pieces, like the instrumental break in "Down To You," (Court and Spark) but there is a constant tension beneath the surface, a dissonance that colors...
Although the instrumentation succeeds in Mitchell's newer, freer style, many of the songs on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter do not. The general rule in any style of musical composition seems to be that the less apparent the structure of a work, the more underlying framework and discipline it requires if it is to be interesting, or even approachable. Admittedly, this rule is not universal. But in Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, like Hejira before it, Mitchell is reckless. The album lacks discipline, and suffers...
...Joni of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, however, rarely steps outside herself. When she writes about her emotions, she fails to place them in any sort of perspective, or to fill in a persona around them. Thus, many of the new songs are portraits--not of a neurotic person--but of a neurosis. And Joni Mitchell's neuroses are not zany-funny, common, or even unique. In fact, they are not even all that interesting. Her songs are like a certain kind of friend--a friend of whom you are genuinely fond--but a friend who is forever wrapped...
...Juan's Reckless Daughter is more than a series of uncontrolled, desperate self-portraits. Mitchell does impose some structure on the album, so that it forms a more or less cohesive whole. She is forever the wayfaring stranger of "The Silky Veils of Ardor," moving on, searching for something intangible. She longs to make life click joyously into place. She sees through other people's unsuccessful efforts to "get through this passion play." In "Otis and Marlena," for example, Mitchell depicts a couple visiting Miami Beach, down from somewhere in the north...